This is John Batcher, conversation with Professor Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute about the Amazon Fires.

They are worse now than at any point since 2005 in the month of July. Why the professor

examines two drivers for the fires of the Amazon? Why this matters of course is the climate of the Earth.

Amazon is like the lungs of the Earth to destroy those forests which date back to the dinosaur asteroid comet stage.

This forest is, the tropical forest is entirely a product of the last 66 million years I'm told. To destroy that

force in any fashion damages the air quality the ability of the earth to breathe.

Evan Ellis on the drivers for the Amazon fires.

Hot spots everywhere.

Worst in more than 20 years.

More of this tonight. That is still the case, John. The fires right now or at

least a record number of fires are a product of two reinforcing things. On the

one hand, the northeast part of the Amazon is indeed experiencing a particularly dry climate which facilitates wildfires just as it does in Chile and California in other places. But at the same time you also have this

continuing pressure of marginalized populations, not the wealthy farmers but

those farmers who are looking for to carve out a little bit of land to raise

cattle and do other things on. And so one of the tried and true ways of

clearing land, if you want to do that, is to just start accidentally a wildfire and

burn the land to clear it and so to some degree those fires reflect those in

search of land for making a livelihood, setting fires is a part of

clearing land. So you bring those two together and you have the current

situation even though the Lulaid Administration has stepped up enforcement of

forest regulations through their Forest Service, Embari, I believe is the name of it.

And even though there has been added attention

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